4 Major A/B Testing Mistakes Most Marketers Make

Mistakes Most Marketers Make

Have you ever considered taking into account the feedbacks of your targeted audience or the likes and dislikes of your targeted audience while designing and developing a landing page? Most people don’t even care about understanding the psychology and the behaviours of their targeted audience while designing and developing marketing materials for their campaigns. They ‘go with their guts’ when it comes to designing a landing page or writing content or headlines for a marketing campaign. But things can go horribly wrong if you continue to do so.

The best way to understand what your targeted audience is looking for is to run an AB testing campaign. The idea behind running an AB testing campaign is to create two variants of the same landing pages and then serving these two variants to a different set of people to observe how these visitors are reacting to it. AB testing does help a lot to validate your decision but it needs to be implemented correctly otherwise you are staring at a huge loss at the end.

A/B testing is a powerful tool for optimizing marketing campaigns, but it’s easy to make mistakes that can compromise the validity and effectiveness of the results. Here are four major A/B testing mistakes that most marketers make:

1. Testing Too Many Variables at Once:

• Mistake: Marketers often test multiple elements (e.g., headlines, images, CTA buttons) in a single A/B test, leading to confusion about what actually influenced the results.
• Solution: Test one variable at a time to accurately determine which specific element caused the change. This is known as isolating variables and helps in making informed, data-driven decisions.

2. Ending the Test Too Early:

• Mistake: Some marketers stop the test as soon as they see a positive result, without reaching statistical significance. This can lead to false positives or unreliable conclusions.
• Solution: Wait until the test has enough data to achieve statistical significance. Use tools or calculators to determine the sample size needed based on your traffic and conversion rates. Running tests for a sufficient time ensures the results are valid and not just due to random fluctuations.

3. Ignoring Audience Segmentation:

• Mistake: Failing to segment audiences properly can lead to misleading results, as different segments may respond differently to variations. For instance, mobile users and desktop users may react differently to the same change.
• Solution: Segment your audience based on relevant factors such as device type, location, user behavior, or demographics. Analyzing results by segment allows you to understand how specific groups react and optimize your campaign for each one accordingly.

4. Not Considering External Factors:

• Mistake: Ignoring factors like seasonality, promotions, or changes in traffic sources can skew A/B test results. For example, if a test is run during a peak sales period, the results might not be representative of regular behavior.
• Solution: Account for external influences by running tests over a period that represents typical conditions, or by excluding data from periods with significant anomalies. Additionally, consider running A/B tests during stable periods to minimize external impact.

Avoiding these common mistakes ensures that your A/B tests yield accurate, actionable insights for optimizing your marketing campaigns effectively. Would you like more information on how to structure effective A/B tests?

Bonus other 4 AB testing mistakes that you need to be aware of so that your marketing campaign doesn’t face a disastrous end –

Choosing the Wrong Tools

The popularity of AB testing has led to the creation of a barrage of AB testing tools. These half-baked and cheap AB testing tools have flooded the market and are making it really difficult for a marketer to make the right decision. Don’t take everything at face value because we have noticed that some AB testing software applications are generating fake reports. Even if they are not fake, reports with dubious metrics can spell disaster for your marketing campaign. If you use these dubious reports to set the tone of your marketing campaign, a disaster is waiting to happen.

Some AB testing software can even overwhelm your website and sometimes, it can slow down the website. A slow website is as good as nothing. So, next time you run an AB testing campaign, you need to check your website’s performance in some other browsers and pcs just to ensure that the codes provided by the AB testing tools are not affecting the overall browsing experience in one way or the other.

Try not to make an upfront payment while selecting an AB testing tool; rather, ask the company to offer you at least 15 days of trial so that you can test everything before making the final call.

You Don’t Have a Strategy Afterall

Analyzing an AB test result is considered the most challenging part of this marketing campaign. But it does not have to be. The reason why most marketers struggle while analyzing the test result is that they don’t have a strategy for the first time. They just happened to venture into this AB testing bandwagon because everybody else was doing it, so they decided to go ahead with the flow. This is a stupid move, to say the least.

You should not analyze the results of the AB test based on your intuition alone. Just identifying a drop in the conversion path is not enough; you need to devise a plan to identify the problems and offer resolutions to those problems. Beating around the bushes would not make any difference here. You need to have a plan and there are no two ways. To better understand the problems, you will have to analyse the data. This can be done by logging in to your Google Analytics accounts and trying to figure out why the visitors are abandoning the conversion funnel in the middle of it. Maybe they are not happy with the shipping cost or maybe they are apprehensive of the questions that you are asking them in order to complete the purchasing process.

You are Just Following Best Practices

Of course, it is a good idea that you are trying to follow the best practices while running an AB testing campaign. But the only problem is that these best practices are not cast in stone, and just because these best practices have worked wonders for thousands of people does not mean that these best practices will also work wonders for your campaign too. Moreover, each business has its unique set of requirements and targeted audience, meaning what works best for a business may not work at all for you.

We are not asking you not to follow best practices; rather, we are asking you to understand the psyche of the targeted audience and then devise a marketing plan commensurate with your unique business propositions and budget. Some common tips are reducing the number of fields in the form, eliminating distractive elements from the landing pages, reducing the number of call-to-action buttons, and so on.

You Don’t Care for Responsive Design

Your website needs to render seamlessly on all devices and browsers and that means a desktop only website is not going to make the cut. Rather you need to invest some money to design and develop a responsive website that works perfectly in all types of devices and screen sizes. Running an AB testing campaigns on a desktop-based website could be the worst mistake that a digital marketer can make.